The principal barrier to elimination of waste (muda) from a factory or supply chain is generally not lack of a technical solution, but rather failure to recognize the waste in the first place. Henry Ford, Shigeo Shingo, and Taiichi Ohno all wrote that most waste hides in plain view because everybody takes it for granted as part of the job or the process. One of Ford's principal success secrets was his ability to recognize waste on sight, and to teach this skill to his entire workforce (as shown by the nature of employee-initiated lean improvements at his company). This Webinar will, through several real-world examples, teach the same principles to the attendee.

Training Overview

There are exactly four kinds of waste: (1) Waste of the time of people (motion inefficiency and waiting), (2) Waste of the time of things (cycle time), (3) Waste of materials, and (4) Waste of energy. This waste often hides in plain view because the workforce takes it for granted and, unlike scrap or rework, it is asymptomatic. That is, it causes no organizational 'pain' to initiate corrective action.

Waste of the time of people: Henry Ford and Frank Gilbreth proved more than 100 years ago that most jobs contain primarily waste motion and waste effort.

Ford wrote that wasted time does not litter the shop floor like wasted material. The waste hides in plain view because the job eventually gets done, and nobody has any reason to question it. If you watch the activity in a fast food restaurant carefully, it will be clear why these enterprises can pay little more than minimum wage. The same lessons carry over into industrial workplaces.

Frank Gilbreth showed long ago that making a video of a job can reveal waste motion graphically and dramatically. It is vital that the workers understand that the purpose of the video is to evaluate the jobs, as opposed to the workers. It might be instructive to have the workers themselves watch the video to identify the waste motions they may have taken for granted for years.

Removal of this waste can easily double or triple a job's value, and therefore its wages.

Waste of the time of things: A process adds value only when a tool transforms a part.

Inventory is directly proportional to cycle time, so elimination of this waste reduces inventory proportionally.

How many factories and supply chains nonetheless take for granted work that is waiting on shelves or racks, in warehouses, or in container ships (floating warehouses)?

Waste of materials: Any material that does not become part of the product is waste.

Some machining processes waste 75 percent or more of the stock even today.

It is highly profitable to turn the waste into a saleable product or, even better, avoid making it in the first place. Henry Ford realized enormous profits by doing both.

Attention to all forms of material waste supports ISO 14001.

Waste of Energy: Identification and elimination of energy waste supports ISO 50001, and the webinar will provide some examples.

Henry Ford's ability to recognize these wastes on sight, and to teach this skill to his entire workforce, was directly responsible for his company's phenomenal success during the early 20th century.

Training Objective

The presentation's primary learning objective is, 'What would Henry Ford do?' One of Ford's key success secrets was his ability to recognize on sight waste that others took for granted, and to teach this ability to his workforce. This, in turn, enabled him to pay unprecedented wages while lowering prices and earning more profits simultaneously. Attendees will gain a similar perspective.

The most valuable takeaway consists of four simple key performance indices (KPIs) for lean manufacturing and lean supply chains. These KPIs encompass all of the Toyota production system's Seven Wastes; that is, each TPS waste is quantifiable in terms of one or more of these KPIs. As a simple example, the TPS's 'Inventory' is directly proportional to 'waste of the time of things' (cycle time) via Little's Law.

This, in turn, allows the entire workforce and supply chain to focus on these four KPIs to identify most forms of waste on sight. A worker who has to do a lot of walking, or who sees another walking, will immediately recognize, 'Waste of the time of people.' Parts that are not actually being transformed by a tool signify 'waste of the time of things,' and the same goes for work in transit. Workers will recognize anything that is thrown away, sent to a waste treatment plant, or whatever as 'waste of materials.' Any electrical or mechanical power that does not transform the work, or transforms it inefficiently, is waste of energy.

When the workforce identifies any of these wastes, there will frequently, if not usually, be an off the shelf solution for it. The most difficult problem is usually to identify the waste in the first place, and this webinar will provide the proven (by Henry Ford's bottom line results) thought process necessary to do that.

A must-attend for:

Manufacturing Managers and Engineers

Production Managers

Plant Managers

Manufacturing Executives - Top & Bottom Line

Logistics Professionals

Continuous Improvement Managers

Product Info Coordinator

About Our Speaker(s)

William A. Levinson P.E.William A. Levinson, P.E., is the principal of Levinson Productivity Systems, P.C. He is an ASQ Fellow, Certified Quality Engineer, Quality Auditor, Quality Manager, Reliability Engineer, and Six Sigma Black Belt. He is also the author of several books on quality, productivity, and management, of which the most recent ... More info